Coding Towards Utopia...by Rob Reynolds

gems

I updated three packages this morning. I didn’t even notice until the tweets came in from @chocolateynuget. How is this possible? It’s simple. I love automation. I built chocolatey to take advantage of automation. So it would make sense that we could automate checking for package updates and publishing those updated packages. These are known as automatic packages. Automatic packages are what set Chocolatey apart from other package managers and I daresay could make chocolatey one of the most up-to-date ......

One of the thoughts I've been considering recently with chocolatey is consistency with packages and naming conventions as chocolatey continues to grow. It's fine to name packages by the app/tool name, that's both intuitive and expected. What I am more interested in is when an application has multiple installation options (ie. an MSI and a ZIP). It can become confusing for people to install these when they don't know what they are getting if they call a package that has both. If you start with one ......

As software creators we don't get to decide what version of our tools / libraries that people use. If we try to force them, our users will go somewhere else. Update: What Type of Software This Applies To This post talks of tools, applications and libraries. Things that end up in the users hands. This does not apply to SaaS or websites. These do not end up in the hands of the users in the same sense. For those of you who immediately think of Chrome or Firefox, which are applications that end up in ......

Yesterday I started a discussion about adding a new command to nuget.exe. It ended in creating an extension to the command line that behaves in the same way without having to dive into the nuget code base or add more complexity to it. I haven’t seen any blog posts or documentation surrounding this new concept (new in nuget 1.4) of extending the command line except for Matt Hamilton’s posts on using NuGet for plug-ins and NuGet with MEF (which are not quite this concept). Here is my experience. I ......

Recently we had a contest to see who could beat my time to get from no code to deployed. Thanks to everyone that participated and everyone that thought about participating in the contest. Most Creative From Zero To Deployed Contest Extended! Unfortunately there were not enough entries to award the most creative video for ZtD. So what we are doing is extending the most creative until May 15, 2011 @ 11:59 PM CST. This gives you almost two months to get your videos in! If you entered before, you are ......

The thing to realize is that the destination is never the most important part of the journey. It’s the journey itself. When you start a journey, you are never fully sure where it is going to end up. We started the journey down package management for .NET three times with Nu[bular] (we in this context means the nu team, not me in particular, I was only involved in the last reboot) before we decided to try an existing infrastructure with Ruby Gems. I have always said that I would use the best tool ......

Dru and I were recently featured on Herding Code Podcast. In the podcast we talk about everything from package management in general to Nubular (Nu) to other package management systems (OpenWrap, Bricks, and Horn, although horn was/is slightly different) to the possibility of Microsoft releasing a package management system. It was a good time and I enjoyed doing the podcast, but the herding code guys start recording at an insane 10:30 PM! I have no idea how I made it through the whole thing and was ......

Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the ......

Recently UppercuT (UC) quietly released version 1 (in August). I’m pretty happy with where we are, although I think it’s a few months later than I originally planned. I’m glad I held it back, it gave me some more time to think about some things a little more and also the opportunity to receive a patch for running builds with UC on Linux. We also released v1.1 very recently (December). UppercuT v1 Builds On Linux Perhaps the most significant changes to UC going v1 is that it now supports builds on ......

Imagine we are awhile into the future. How do you get open source releases down to your project so that you can use them? How do you get the products down to your computer so that you can use them? Is it easier or harder than the way we’ve always done it before? The Past and Present Before we can go there, let’s look at what we do now (the past is really the same for us here). Let’s say I want to use NHibernate. What do I do? There are basically three paths we all follow in this process. 1. Never ......

In a previous post I mentioned how I was going to show you how UppercuT (UC) has the ability to make gems stupid simple to create and publish. You ask if gems can get any easier and to that I answer, “Why YES, they can!” How about just filling out the information for the gemspec, running a build and having a nice, shiny new gem ready for publishing? Rock The Gems Basically you want to get the latest release of UppercuT. You can download it or grab the source and compile. There are already instructions ......

There has been a lot of response in the community about this gems idea we’ve been talking about. I even had the opportunity to sit down with Nick Quaranto, the guy behind Rubygems.org, over coffee Sunday and talk about where we think we are going and what it will take to get there. One of the biggest things that everyone wants to see carrying this idea forward is that we migrate off of Rubygems.org and have our own gem server. And we all agree this is a great idea. There are just two things that ......

In my last post I didn’t mention dependencies. Dependencies are their own animal. They require a couple more things to be in place. Let’s talk about those things. In the .NET world, the dependency for compiled bits is usually an exact version of a reference. Let me explain. So for example, you have a reference to log4net, and you don’t ILMerge it into your assembly. You now have a dependency that the DLL needs to be there and a particular version (outside of redirecting the bindings). So what I’m ......

In my last post I showed gems being used for .NET. Now let’s talk about How. Most of this stuff I’ve learned over the past two days, so if I have a mistake here or you have a better idea, please don’t hesitate to offer a better solution. The GemSpec The Gem::Specification reference is your friend. In order to create a gem, you need to define a gem specification, commonly called a “gemspec”. A gemspec consists of several attributes. Some of these are required; most of them are optional. From here ......

The Ruby community has enjoyed a great user experience with a package management system they use called Gems. A gem is a package (or a library), compressed with some additional metadata, and can be either source files or binaries. Let’s focus on binary gems. We have the same concept in .NET (DLLs/EXEs). You may have references to other DLLs. When you want to update a reference you are using on a project, you may also need to update its dependencies as well. And so on and so forth. A package management ......